At an evening service in a church I attended last week, the lady who
led the prayer session did not even bother to quote from the Bible to
drive home her point; she simply referred the congregation to the Book
of Olajumoke: “How many of you have heard the story of the bread seller
in Lagos and how her life has been transformed?” With several hands up,
she enjoined members to pray by reminding everyone: “No matter the
challenge we face either as an individual or as a country, God can
instantly rewrite our story such that we can move from poverty into
prosperity; from lack into abundance, just like Olajumoke. Now, pray…”
That this is a difficult period for most Nigerians is an
understatement. With the prices of commodities, including foodstuff,
skyrocketing as the Naira continues to dance ‘Skelewu’, life is becoming
very hard for most families. Even for the rich, not only are the
shelves of the supermarkets where they shop getting empty, those of them
who have children abroad can no longer sleep easy. And in the absence
of any coherent policy options by the current administration to deal
with these economic challenges, our people are left with only the hope
of divine intervention as solutions to their problems. Then came
Olajumoke!
A few weeks ago, Mrs Olajumoke Orisaguna, 27, was just another bread
hawker on the streets of Lagos until she encountered celebrity
photographer, T.Y Bello, a genius in her craft and a maverick quick
thinker who, like most creative artists, could easily make sense of
something that seems ordinarily intangible. In an instinctive moment of
brilliance, she matched a bread seller with a Nigerian-born British
singer, Tinie Tempah and produced a photographic “duet” that caught the
imagination of the world. The rest, to deploy a popular cliché, is now
history. Today, the young bread seller, married to a man who reportedly
fits sliding doors, has hit the jackpot of fame and fortune that has
elevated her to the status of a god in many Nigerian homes.
Before I go further, I join in rejoicing with Olajumoke on her good
luck but I hope she also has the good sense to know that life cannot be
the same again. From now on, the men she would have to deal with are no
longer the lecherous ‘danfo’ drivers, vulcanizers and sundry touts who,
according to Reuben Abati, “will offer to buy bread and something else
along with it”; but the Lagos Big Boys who know what they want and how
to get it and I feel sorry for her poor husband. The environment to
which his wife has now been thrust, albeit unprepared, would not allow
her to be and there are too many sharks in the river in which she must
from now swim. How will she handle such pressure? Only God can help her
now.
I watched Olajumoke’s interview on Youtube and she could only speak
in Yoruba with an English interpreter which confirms that she is not
educated. But she is very attractive—perhaps the attribute that
qualifies her to be cast as a model in the first place. The good aspect
of the Olajumoke story which of course is being ignored is that fortune
found her in the place of diligence. She was at work, trying to earn a
honest, even if modest, income for herself and family by hawking bread,
when she ran into the photo session that changed her life. That
ultimately may be her redemption.
There is a lot to read about Olajumoke online but the one that stands
out for me was the piece last week by Abimbola Adelakun, easily one of
Nigeria’s most gifted columnists of the current generation. Ms Adelakun,
who interrogates the attempt to turn a happenstance into a prescription
for success, argues rather forcefully in her piece, “Olajumoke and the
trouble with sentimentality” that the uncritical national hysteria over
the fairy tale story of the bread seller has blinded us all to the flip
side: that she actually personifies the failings of our society with
shrinking opportunities for children of the poor.
Ms Adelakun raises several questions about the hypocrisy of the men
and women in corporate Nigeria who are now making the bread seller the
face of their businesses, at a time one desperate young man who stripped
himself naked inside a banking hall has been ignored by his banker. She
reminds us that we have missed the real message in the drama of the
bread seller. “Olajumoke’s story puts a face to the grim poverty
statistics in Nigeria. Yet, she is just one case out of many others.
Millions of people have worse tales to narrate. Her account of poverty
and deprivation up till this time, however, has been obscured by the
sentimentality of her discovery. We talk about her being a bread-seller
only as a jump-off point to narrating the other extreme of the tale
where she becomes a model. This, in itself, is the trouble with
sentimentality: it induces emotions, but never channels them towards
meaningful socio-political action,” she wrote.
The danger of fairy tales, especially in a society like ours,
according to Adelakun, is that they “are not only non-normative, they
are sedative; that is why they are read to children about to sleep, not
adults that live in a realistic world. Fairy tales do not expect us to
question their plot, rather they gush at the saccharine sweetness of
‘happily ever after’…”
I agree entirely with her summation. In as much as we cannot begrudge
Olajumoke her good fortunes, it is important not to send a wrong
message with her story. To the extent that there is such a thing in life
as the luck of the draw, as we often see in lottery and football, there
will always be people who would “make it” without much sweat. But they
will be only a negligible few. So, making Olajumoke a formula for
success or using her as a prayer point just does not cut. Indeed, for a
great majority of the people, they may work very hard, keep positive
attitudes, and yet could still end up with some “sliding doors” slammed
against them in as many times as they try.
Therefore, the message we should inculcate in our young people is
that it is still work that enables opportunity, not luck or chance. We
must constantly remind them of Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s wise counsel
that their task is not to foresee the future, “but to enable it.” And in
the age that we are in, working entails certain preparations which
include good education. Unfortunately, that critical area of our
national life is where we are leaving many of our young people behind to
be hawking bread and other commodities without any future beyond
waiting for luck.
For the attention of those who are romanticising the Olajumoke story,
here is something for them to ponder. In the 2015 United Nations
Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) report under Education, this is a
paragraph about our country: “Forty per cent of Nigerian children aged
6-11 do not attend any primary school with the Northern region recording
the lowest school attendance rate in the country, particularly for
girls…Many children do not attend school because their labour is needed
to either help at home or to bring additional income into the family…”
Nobody should get me wrong, I am happy for Olajumoke as someone who
also comes from a very poor background and who knows what it means to
experience serious poverty and the good fortunes to leave it behind, at
some point. But even at that, I still fail to understand what message
all the corporate entities and public institutions are trying to project
by exploiting Olajumoke’s fame, and using her to be sending messages to
Nigerians. Are they telling us we should send our children to the
streets to be selling bread while they await the day they would have a
divine encounter with Angel T.Y. Bello?
Ordinarily, I would expect the message to be about dignity in labour
but then, those people are also smart enough to know they cannot promote
hawking so in essence the only message left is the hollow one of luck.
And you don’t sell luck, do you? Well, at least we know how it all ended
for those who did in our most recent political past!
It should worry us that as a nation we have turned luck to an
ideology. We are also not equipping our young people with the requisite
tools to work by the manner in which we have criminally neglected the
education sector. And we don’t make the right choices when it comes to
other policy issues either. Yet while luck does happen, it is not
something that you wait for as we do in Nigeria; and that explains why
some people could benchmark the oil price for the 2016 federal
government budget at $38 per barrel at a time the commodity was selling
for between $28 and $32 per barrel, on the assumption that mother luck
would smile on us and the price would rise again!
Therefore, while the Olajumoke story may be good for Nollywood, it is
time we woke up to the real world. If we look back to the last four
decades, periods of prosperity have been in moments of oil booms which
means they were not products of our efforts. They were just periods
when, like the bread seller, we ran into our own T.Y. Bellos! That is
not the way to build a serious society.
The most unfortunate aspect is that we don’t even learn from our own
experience. At a time you expect the current administration to sit down
and fashion out economic plans to deal with this most difficult period,
our president has become a crude oil seller, hawking the commodity from
Saudi Arabia to Qatar. Rather than take responsibility for our future by
planning without oil, we have surrendered to the philosophy of luck and
chance by hoping (and praying) the price of the commodity would rise
again so we will have more money to share and the value of our national
currency can shore up.
In another context, the erection of the Olajumoke story into a myth
of faith underlines a common failure of our public consciousness. In
spite of the proliferation of schools, colleges and universities, a
society that believes so much in education remains one of the most
superstitious and non-logical in the world. In a population of 170
million people, one bread seller in Lagos gets accidentally ‘discovered’
as suitable for a modelling role and is therefore endorsed and rewarded
by companies and interests that want to derive maximum publicity from
her lowly circumstances. And with that, many Nigerians are using the
bread seller as a “point of contact” to God in their supplications.
I wish those peddling the Olajumoke story will stop and compute the
chance of another bread seller becoming a celebrity in our country any
time soon. But we are dealing with a fickle society here. It is like the
gentleman who claimed to have trekked from Lagos to Abuja in solidarity
with Buhari’s emergence as president in anticipation of some reward.
Soon enough, there were as many trekkers as there were imminent winners
of governorship elections until the media and the public learnt to
ignore the jokers. Now, every bread seller in our country is being made
to see themselves as potential Olajumokes!
All said, I must clarify that as a Christian, I am also at home with
the message that Olajumoke’s story exemplifies the fact that God indeed
intervenes in the affairs of men. My point of departure is with those
who believe we can build a sustainable future, either as individuals or
as a nation, by relying on luck and chance.
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PLEASE BE POLITE